The architecture and layout of the museum is designed so that you dip down physically into the Holocaust and walk back up out of it concluding with a stunning view of Jerusalem. The walls and floor are triangular slabs of concrete made to feel like they are closing in on you. Visiting Yad Vashem with the birthright crew was emotional and quietly intense. Many of the people we were with had family members in the wall of names and our group was obviously moved by the shared experience.
It wasn’t so much the facts of the terrible history that affected me, but the idea of “Free but not Liberated”. This concept first really struck me when our guide, Michael’s, mother spoke to us. She was very young when her camp was liberated but she did not have a true home for years after the Holocaust– their family and widowed mother bounced between their ransacked house in Poland to hateful neighbors to British military tents and camps to overcrowded starving ships to Cyprus and finally to a one bedroom apartment in a foreign country- israel. She still does not speak about what happened in the concentration camps, murdered friends and siblings, and is clearly deeply traumatized from events occurring in her very early childhood.